I'm Pepe Carrillo. Mexican, trained as a lawyer, based in Barcelona. I build the structural foundations of startups — ownership, governance, capital architecture — so founders can focus on what they actually want to be doing.
I call this venture architecture. I made the term up. The work is as old as business itself. But nobody had a good name for the thing that sits between "expensive lawyer who sends you a 40-page memo you'll never read" and "your mate who did a startup once and thinks he knows everything."
I grew up in Mexico City. Studied law because my mother said it was a good idea and she was right about most things. Spent six years at a Big Law firm in New York and Mexico City, where a misplaced comma in a $2 billion facility agreement could end your career and a late night was just a Tuesday. Closed deals for clients like ENGIE and Nissan across multiple jurisdictions.
Big law taught me how structure works at scale. How the invisible architecture of deals — the governance clauses, the liquidation preferences, the board composition math — determines who gets rich, who keeps control, and who gets quietly pushed out. I learned that the most important parts of any deal are the parts nobody reads until something goes wrong. Then Yale for the MAM, then the Camino de Santiago to figure out what actually mattered. Then Africa, where I spent years at ALU and ALX as VP of Expansion, scaling operations across 25 countries on 3 continents.
I moved to Nairobi, then Kigali, then wherever the work took me. I started working with founders — mostly in East Africa — who were building extraordinary things on structural foundations held together with duct tape and optimism. Brilliant products. Terrible cap tables. I once closed a deal structure on a napkin in a Nairobi bar because the power went out and nobody could open their laptops.
That's when I realized the thing I was good at. Not the law — the architecture underneath it. The structural decisions that cost $3,000 to get right at incorporation and $300,000 to untangle at Series B. The conversations founders need to have before they raise money, not after. The stuff that's invisible until it breaks, and when it breaks, it breaks everything.
So I built Mexzungu Group. An outlaw studio for venture architecture. We help founders design structures that survive the earthquake — because in startup land, the ground is always shaking.
Because someone told me to write a "startup structure for dummies" guide and I got annoyed enough to write a real one. Because the best structural advice is buried in 40-page legal memos that nobody reads. Because every week I meet a founder who made a $85,000 mistake that a single conversation could have prevented.
I write the conversations I wish founders had before they needed them. If something I publish here saves one person from a preventable structural crisis, the whole site was worth building.
Understand the business first. The legal analysis follows. If you can't explain why your advice matters in money terms, you haven't finished thinking.
Speed matters. Precision matters more. But neither matters if you can't ship. The world rewards people who do things, not people who think about doing things.
Leading means owning the outcome. Being the person who says "here's what we should do" not "here are some options for your consideration."
The moment you think you've made it is the moment you stopped growing. Complacency kills careers faster than mistakes do.
"Can switch between radical and conventional approach to secure results, as needed. Super creative, talks the talk and walks the walk, legal rockstar, fun to work with."
Michael Muturi · Head of Biochar, Tupande (One Acre Fund)
"I know someone extraordinarily capable who will enable you to do things you thought were impossible to achieve. Get ready to rumble, he is no joke."
Lucie Talichet · Senior IP Legal Counsel, ALX
I'm based in Barcelona. I work across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and anywhere the founders are interesting and the problems are structural.